1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to systems for improving communication among people who are collaborating in the performance of a task and more specifically to such systems which are implemented by establishing a shared repository of information which is accessible to the collaborators via a network.
2. Description of Related Art
Computers coupled to networks have made collaborative work easier than ever before. At the most fundamental level, file sharing and email have eliminated the requirement that collaborators be in physical proximity to each other. The change tracking arrangements that are provided by most document processing systems further support collaborative work, as do computer-implemented scheduling and tracking systems. Integrated systems for collaborative work such as Lotus Notes® provide features such as file sharing, email, change tracking, scheduling, and tracking in a single package. A problem with these tools and integrated systems for collaborative work is that they are very general. It is up to the user to adapt them to his or her needs. To be sure, a skilled user of a tool such as a spreadsheet can adapt the tool to almost any purpose, but to do this, extensive programming is required. Such programming requires a specialist, and the result of the programming is often opaque to those who are not masters of the tool both of the tool and of what is being represented. Indeed, a general problem with tools that require extensive programming to adapt them to a user's needs is that the programming is usually done by a specialist who understands the tools or the system, but not the nature of the collaboration, and as is usual in such situations, communication between the programming specialist and the users is usually difficult and sometimes impossible.
Another approach to collaborative work has been systems that are specialized for collaborative work in a particular special area, such as bookkeeping. For example, the Quickbooks® small business accounting software manufactured by Intuit, Inc. provides a model of a small business as seen from the point of view of an accountant that the user of Quickbooks can customize for his or her own purposes. While the model of the small business that Quickbooks provides is very useful for accounting, it has no relevance whatever to other aspects of the business.
The parent of the present patent application describes a system for collaborative work which permits the collaborators both to make their own model of the collaborative work and to modify that model without the help of skilled programmers. The system of the parent permitted the collaborators to define a model for their collaborative work by defining goals and projects and relate information such as scheduling information, priority information, cost information, discussions, and locations of further information to the goals and projects. The collaborators could organize themselves into groups and define access to a goal or project in terms of those groups. The model could further include hierarchies of the goals and projects. Finally, the model could include hierarchies of domains and a goal or a project could be assigned to a single domain. The graphical user interface for the system permitted display of goals and projects in terms of the hierarchies they were members of, in terms of the domains they belonged to, and in terms of scheduling, priority, and cost. Once a particular goal or project had been selected in the GUI, the information related to the goal or project could be displayed in the GUI and modified.
One example of the kinds of things that are possible with the system for collaborative work of the parent of the present patent application is the following: a model of a law firm made using the system may include a goal and project hierarchy for each of the firm's clients. Each client's goal and project hierarchy may include a billing project for the client. The model may further include a domain hierarchy that includes a billing domain, and the billing project for each client may belong to the billing domain. The billing project for a client is thus visible not only from the point of view of the client's domain and project hierarchy, but also from the point of view of the billing domain.
Experience with the system of the parent has shown that the technique of making a model of the collaborative effort is much more broadly applicable than originally contemplated, and can in fact be used for any kind of collaborative work. Experience with the system of the parent has also shown that the manner in which the model was made in the original unnecessarily restricted the system's usefulness and that the user interface was unnecessarily complex. It is thus an object of the present invention to overcome these limitations and to provide an improved system for collaborative work of the type disclosed in the parent.